Peloponnesus: notes of study and travel

Preface

. rPHE second title which I have given to my book indicates its character and limits its pretensions. While on the one hand it is so far from exhausting the copious theme ' Peloponnesus,' that it leaves many places and many questions untouched, or only casually alludes to them, on the other hand it claims, within its limited scope, to be the product of personal observation and independent research. I had no ambition to add one more to the multitude of Travellers' books, but I chose the narrative form as the most convenient mode of connecting together a mass of observations and reflections otherwise desultory and iuconsequent. I have endeavoured to select such topics, and so to treat them, as, if possible, to interest not merely archæ ologists, but educated men generally. I have wished to make the book grave in substance and light in manner.

This is, I know, a hazardous experiment. In aiming at both objects I run great risk of hitting neither, and may find that the book appears trivial to the one class and pedantic to the other.

PREFACE.

. During the tour I was occupied in comparing local features and extant remains with the conclusions of Colonel Leake and the testimony of ancient authors, especially Pausanias. In this task I was materially aided by the large French map ; and I had throughout the advantage of the counsels of my friend and fellow traveller Professor Thompson. In writing the book my plan has been the same. I have deliberately abstained from consulting more recent writers on the subject. Where, for special reasons, I have deviated from this rule, I have always mentioned the author referred to. If I had discussed all the theories broached by modern travellers and scholars, I should have given my text an air of controversy or of commen tary, and overloaded my notes with references, which would indeed have been ' caviare to the general.' I shall no doubt discover that many of the views put forward here as original, have been already propounded or controverted in other works.1 Even so, in the one case, the truth will bo confirmedby an additional and independent For instance, I now find that the dissenters from the received view as to the destination of the underground chambers at Mycenæ, have been more numerous than I was aware of.

Among them are Dr. E. D. Clarke and Colonel Mure. I take this opportunity of apologizing for having inadvertently attributed to Colonel Mure an opinion as to the identity of the Erasinus with the river at Stymphalus, which is really due to Colonel Leake.

PREFACE.

. IX witness ; in the other case, my arguments must go for what they are worth. Having spent the best part of my life in studies connected with ancient Greece, I have, per haps, as much right to form and express a judgment of my own as others who have trodden in the steps of Colonel Leake. All are but gleaners after him. It is indeed impossible to ignore or depreciate the services which he has rendered to Greek geography, archæology, and literature. His truthfulness, his sagacity, his diligence, and his learning are above all praise. I am the more anxious to make this avowal as, otherwise, I might be supposed by a hasty reader to have written in a spirit of antagonism. But the fact is, that while I have dwelt upon those points on which I ventured to differ from him, I have passed over in silence the far greater number of cases in which I assented to his views.

Not unfrequently I have been indebted to him for the data which enabled me to combat his conclusions. The most experienced and accurate of travellers cannot claim exemption from error. Notes written hastily and under difficulties are reduced to form after a multitude of novel sights, a constant change of scene, and a succession of days crowded with various incidents, have inter vened to perplex and disturb the memory. Every traveller who writes a book, has on this score to ask for the indulgence of his readers, especially of such as put it to X

PREFACE.

. the severe test of reading it in the country of which it treats. I have done what I could to guard against inac curacy. My descriptions were for the most part written on the spot. I have seldom altered the original rough phrases of my note-book for the sake of rounding a sen tence, and never preferred antithesis to fidelity. Iu speaking of the modern Greeks, I have borne in mind how liable a foreigner is to misinterpret such man ners and customs as are strange to him ; and I have not ventured upon any general and sweeping assertions unless they were corroborated by the authority of some one more entitled by long residence in the country to speak positively of its people. I have set down nothing in malice, and nothing, I trust, in haste. C O N T E N T S.

Chapter I. Outward Bound

TT^ IGHTEEN centuries ago the remote and savage island ■*—* of Britain was periodically visited by certain enter prising merchants of Marseilles engaged in the tin-trade. These merchants were no doubt Greeks ; for though Greece had lost all political consequence and national spirit, yet those who called themselves her children retained iu their hands the commerce of the Mediterranean and the world. Adventurous from a restless temperament and love of gain, with a keen instinct of self-preservation and a practised dexterity that supplied the place of physical courage, un weighted with any prejudices in favour of truth and honesty, the then Greeks far outstripped in commercial enterprise and in commercial success their Roman masters ; clumsy men, who could only be great en masse, in an elephantine, imperial way, who conquered nations and governed provinces, but could neither found firms nor keep ledgers, whose foreign journeys were undertaken by fifty thousands together, and resulted, it may be, in an ovation or even a triumph, but yielded no tangible return, much less an adequate profit for the outlay of time, men, and capital.

So, while aggregate Rome grew and grew, n and aggregate Hellas dwindled and dwindled, individual Romans became poorer and poorer, individual Greeks richer and richer. Politically, the former despised the latter ; personally, they envied them ; and from this scorn and envy sprang a hatred such as it has always been the fortune of the Greeks to excite in the breasts of their neighbours; such as is felt for them at this present time by the aborigines of Smyrna, Trieste, or Manchester. Doubtless those Cives Romani who were reduced to com merce, were often compelled to borrow money of the gentile Shylocks, and repaid them with compound abuse. In one notable instance the abuse was clothed in hexa meter measure, and has been preserved to our time. Through the exaggerations of the satirist we can discern the contour of the substantial truths which they enfold.

The Greekling of that day, under the impulse of want or avarice, was ready for any enterprise however arduous, any journey however distant. Was there a demand for tin, and would it leave a profit on importation, the Greek was ready to start even for Britain. Such expedition did he use, that in three months he returned safe and sound, and was seen bustling about the principal stoa of Mar seilles, jingling the leathern purse he wore at his girdle, and showing to all that listed his bran-new samples of Cornish tin. Our enterprising friend is accosted amongst others by a stranger who is walking about with tablets in his hand, on whicli he makes memoranda. The stranger's accent shows that he is from Sicily. After a casual glance at the specimens, he puts a string of questions on matters not connected with the markets, out of mere idle curiosity, about the strange island and its wild people, &c, and receives the information that the natives about the promontory of Belarion, the extreme south western corner of Britain, are, owing to their intercourse with strangers, far more civilized than the other savages of the island; that they have learnt the value of their tin, are able to dig it out themselves, and cart it across the sands to Iktis — an island at high tide — ' whence,' says the merchant, ' we ship it for the opposite coast of Galatia ' (meaning Gaul) . ' We thence bring it on pack-horses in thirty days to Marseilles.

And now, stranger, how much do ye bid, per Attic talent, for the tin?' The stranger declines to make a bid, pockets his tablets and walks away, to the infinite disgust of our friend, who finds that he has been wasting his time and breath on a fellow who proves to be a historian or geographer, or something of the sort, one of that purblind tribe who are the disgrace of the nation, and who do not see that the true, lasting greatness of the Greek race rests on their success in commercial speculation. The scene I have described is not altogether imaginary. I will not vouch for the exact place and time, but some thing like my description certainly did happen somewhere about Marseilles in the reign of Augustus Cæsar. What the merchant's name was, I cannot tell you ; the stranger's name was Diodorus.1 1 Diodorus Siculus, b. v. p. 301.

In the place which he called Iktis, where the tin depot was, he seems to have blended the characteristic features of the Isle of Portland and St. Michael's Mount, and then to have baptized the compound by the name belonging rightfully to the Isle of Wight. B In those days, then, the trader laden with British tin made his way from the shore of the Channel to Marseilles in thirty days. The modern traveller not similarly en cumbered performs the journey in about the same number of hours; so brief is the space which, thanks to mecha nical science, separates the most westerly of Greek cities from the land whose very existence was unsuspected by Herodotus and whose whereabouts, jealously concealed by the Phenician merchants, anxious to monopolize the trade, long continued unknown to their rivals.

The Greek who at length discovered the secret was himself a native of Marseilles, by name Pytheas.1 How would he have mar velled if the gods of Delphi and Dodona could in very truth have pierced through the veil of futurity, and had told him that that land was to be the cradle of a race which, in courage, perseverance, and tenacious nationality should be the Hellenes of a new world ; that at a time when, with rare exceptions, the famous cities of Hellas should be abandoned to the encroaching sea, the gathering sand dunes and the growing thicket, Britain should be the seat of cities many times greater than the greatest, and many times wealthier than the wealthiest of those old cities ; the metropolis of an empire wider than the dreams of Alcibiades, or the achievements of Alexander; and the centre of a commerce to which the ocean should be no longer the dreadful limit, but the familiar highway.

The descendants of those rude barbarians might now without presumption expound Thucydides to the citizens of Athens. They visit Greece with the feeling of pilgrims eager to pay 1 Plin. N.S. ii. 75. their devotions at the holy places of literature and philo sophy and art ; and they gather, for the decoration of their homes, mutilated fragments of Hellenic art, at a lavish cost which would have staggered Pericles and Phidias. But I need not dwell upon facts patent to all, or illustrate a contrast so obvious. I touch upon the subject only because it is one of those commonplaces which inevitably occupy the mind of the student and the traveller, tedious if dilated ou, but which it were affectation to omit. Except the scanty fragments collected in its museum, Marseilles contains, I believe, not a vestige of Greek, or even Roman, antiquity.

Of the walls, temples, quays, and aqueducts of old Massilia there remains not one stone upon another. Antiquarian tastes are seldom pre valent in a commercial city. I should have said never — but that I bethink me of Temple Bar, which hinders the enunciation of my proposition as effectually as it impedes the traffic of Fleet-street. But, making all allowances for Temple Bar, it neither prevents traffic nor negatives pro position. Your men of business have no leisure for dilet tanteism, and the daily study of invoices and bills of lading is not favourable to the growth of sentiment. With such men, where ground-rents are high, 'the mouldering lodges of the past ' stand but a poor chance. Only those who have little concern with the present have much love for the past. This is a passion fostered by seclusion and study, sometimes morbid and restless, evaporating in mere senti ment, but of inestimable service, when it finds its development in action, in preserving, arranging, illustrating its treasures and storing up materials for the historians, artists, and philosophers who are yet unborn.

By the nature of the case the antiquarian spirit in any nation must be of somewhat late growth, yet its prevalence is no indication of national decline. On the contrary, it is strongest among nations which have not yet passed their meridian, and in an exceptional class whose combativeness is stimulated by the different spirit which prevails around them. It is strongest in Northern, and weakest in Southern Europe. It was strong in Alexandria and Per gamos in the best days of the Macedonian kings ; it was obviously feeble in Athens and Corinth in the days of Pausanias. It was strong in Italy under Claudius ; it was almost extinct, with all other lights of the old world, in Honorius' time. Never was antiquarianism so rife as it is this day in Prance and England. Indeed, in the former country it is so rampant, that it overleaps itself and falls on the other ; not content with conserving, it actually commits restorations.

I make no doubt that there is a flourishing society of antiquaries at Marseilles, which might have done good service if it had been somewhat more antique itself and come into existence while there were still some antiquities to preserve or restore. Now they are busy worshipping their patron Epimetheus ; in rustic English, ' shutting the stable-door on the stolen horse.' To this hypothetical society I should attribute the design of a fountain erected during this present century, and thus inscribed, cLes descendans des Phoceens k Homere.' One only trace of the ancient Phoceans is believed to survive in the name of a street, Rue de la Cannebiere, which is supposed to be derived from kdnnabis, the Greek word for ' hemp,' • tow.' The derivation is probably correct, but the inference more than doubtful.

Kdnnabi still survives in modern Greek, and it is more probable that the name of the street is a relic of Levantine commerce in the middle ages than of the Phocean settlement two thousand four hundred years ago. Marseilles, like London, has enjoyed a continuous and, of late, increasing prosperity. Placed as it is on a magnificent harbour, near the embouchure of a great river flowing from and through a region of abundant and varied fertility, its prosperity depends on permanent not transi tory causes, natural not accidental. The name, which is not of Greek origin, implies that the Phoceans found a city ready to their hands, and under the same name it has continued to flourish, of whatever race its masters might be. The destiny of Naples has been somewhat similar. It has retained the name given it by its Greek founders; like Marseilles, it has been exempted from the general ruin of Greek towns ; and, like Marseilles, retains no trace of its old masters.

I embarked at Marseilles on the evening of Thursday, March 20th, and landed at Naples early on the morning of the following Sunday. The incidents of such a voyage are neither novel nor attractive ; instead, therefore, of describing what has been repeated usque ad nauseam, I will ask the reader who is kind enough to accompany me on my journey, to reflect how this Mediterranean was in former days ' a Greek lake,' in a far stricter sense than it ever was, or ever will be, ' a French lake ;' the fleet of the Messageries Imperiales to the contrary notwithstanding. So early as six centuries before Christ, on all the islands, and on the greater portion of the mainland, there was scarcely a commodious harbour, scarcely a coign of vantage, where the adventurous Greeks had not established a town or a factory.

So strong was the principle of vita lity in the old stock, that wherever an offshoot or bud was washed ashore, it took root and grew into a vigorous tree. A ship-load of emigrants speedily developed into an in dependent self-supporting community, holding their own against all comers. The like has never been seen in the world's history, for the Italian maritime republics of the middle ages offer rather an illustration than a parallel. In the sixth century b.c. a thousand Amalfis fringed the shores of the Mediterranean. It was not till the vitality of Hellas began to decay that a tendency towards agglome ration manifested itself. The Athenian confederacy and the Spartan were the prelude to Macedonian and Roman conquest, and to the utter corruption of national life which subsisted during the long agonies of the Byzantine monarchy.

The power of that empire was a vis inertia ; its unity — the unity of cohesion, not of organized vitality. After five days spent at Naples and in its neighbourhood, we embarked on the afternoon of March 28th for Malta. Coming on deck early next morning, I saw behind us Stromboli smoking like a factory-chimney, and before us the Straits of Messina smooth under a drizzling rain. In all ages and in all countries the prosaic spirit of the general public insists upon solidifying into fact the fictions of the poet, and so these straits, being the narrowest west ward with which the first Greek sailors were acquainted, were fixed upon as the site of the Homeric Scylla and Charybdis. To transform the monsters into a rock and a whirlpool respectively is an easy process. Rocks there are in plenty, a choix, but to find the whirlpool is not so easy.

For want of a better, a sort of eddy or backwater, close to Messina, is pointed out to the curious stranger as Charybdis, miles away from any possible Scylla. The most foolish of pilots would not give Scylla so wide a berth as to run the risk of falling into the other alternative. The truth is that the scene of this, as of other fictions, is to the poet's mind in some far-off unknown ocean, a mere brain-born fantasy, without the smallest nucleus of fact or the least soupcon of allegory. The marvellous beauty of Messina demands an acknow ledgment by way of passing toll from every stranger. A long line of stately buildings fronts the quay, the hills behind are crowned each with a convent or a fortress, while streets and gardens in picturesque medley fill all the hollows and climb all the steeps.

Perhaps no city has suffered more from earthquakes, pestilence, and cannon balls ; but its position as the key of Sicily, or rather the link of the two Sicilies, prevents its sharing the ruin of Syracuse and Agrigentum. A torrent divides the city into two unequal parts, and the detritus brought down by it forms, with some addition from art, the sickle-shaped mole which constitutes and protects the harbour. It was not, however, from this mole that the Greek name Zancle was derived, but from the shape of the harbour itself, quite different in old times. In the sixteenth century an earthquake filled up a great part of it. Notwithstanding the ravages of nature and man, the city still contains some specimens of antiquity, medieval, not classical — the cathedral, for instance, in the apses of which are some large mosaics of the thirteenth century done by Greek artists, of the Madonna, St. John the Theologian, and others.

It would be curious to compare the style of these works with the mosaics in the Neapolitan Museum brought from Pompeii, executed twelve hundred years before, and inscribed with the name of Dioscorides of Samos. One seems to feel that the imperfections of the older work were owing to the unskilfulness of the artist, those of the later work to the decline of art. After eight hours' stay, we left Messina. A furious wind and sea drove most of the passengers below. I remained on deck, and was more than rewarded for my long endurance by a lifting of the clouds, which revealed Etna with all her snows, lighted up by the westering sun. Next morning, Sunday, March 30th, we landed at Malta, and in the evening sailed in a new screw-steamer, the Danube, for Syra. Rough weather which rendered the deck untenable, a thumping screw which made sleep im possible, a pitching vessel, and indifferent food, made our three days' voyage seem like an age.

On Tuesday we caught sight of Cephalonia far to the north, and later Cape St. Gallo, with the snowy Taygetus beyond it. On Wednesday afternoon we sailed under the red cliffs of Melos, and at ten at night anchored off Syra. The Etesian wind blowing steadily from the north-east deterred our captain from entering the harbour ; so we lay all the next day under the lee of a barren island capped with a newly-built lighthouse, full in sight of the town. By this delay we missed the Austrian boat which leaves every Thursday for the Piræus, and were compelled to wait at Syra till Sunday, much commiserated by a fellowpassenger, who assured us that Syra was ' a place to cut one's throat in.' However, to a landsman long in pitching steamer pent, all terra firma is welcome as a home — omne solum patria.

The little Hotel d'Angleterre furnished decent lodging and abundant food, and the new people and strange modes of life afforded us ample amusement. Two simultaneous festivals were going on — the accession of King Otho and the Annunciation. Greeks, wearing the so-called national, really Albanian costume, white kilts of ample fold and embroidered jackets, swung about the quays and filled the cafes — Greeks from the islands still wearing the livery of servitude, baggy trousers tight at the ankles, and coats of the same colour ; grave Turks, and fussy Europeans of all nations. To find people actually reckoning by drachmas, to read the signs over the shops, to see those venerable characters and that ancient language applied to the meanest and most trivial uses of every-day life — all this produces in the mind of a new-comer a sensation of unreality, as if the whole thing were an elaborate joke.

Strange contrasts, too, meet the eye and ear in this little Babel. For instance, entering one day a Pan lopoleion, or general store, where all things are sold from waterproof capes to pickled walnuts, we found Epami nondas the owner in altercation with a ship's captain from Hull ; if that may be called an altercation where the Yorkshireman poured forth a torrent of provincial and emphatic Saxon, and the Greek only shrugged his shoulders. The cafes are numerous, as in most Greek towns, and all well-frequented. There is no attempt at decoration, nor any provision in the way of sofas or chairs for the external comfort of the guests, only bare walls and wooden benches; on the other hand, there is a goodly array of liqueur-bottles, a long row of narghiles, called in the new lingua franca of the Levant, per onomatopoean, hobble-bobble, and a constant supply of good coffee.

The refection is extraordinarily cheap. Here is a bill incurred (and paid) by a party at the Elysia (to. 'HXucrm), spelt as the waiter would have spelt it. I give it, without ex planation, as a specimen of the phonetic orthography common in the modern Greek, and at the same time a lesson in Greek currency : 2 Ka<j)(j)i 20 \-<j)T<i. I pocriJAio IO 2 TravvZ, 6o i x°'/3/3-_A-/3oj3/3£X . . . io The total amount being one hundred leptas, or one drachma, equal to 8^d. sterling. There are few more striking sights than the town, or rattier towns, as viewed from the sea. The old town, Syra proper, occupies the upper half of a steep conical hill ; the new town, Hermopolis — not inaptly named as the seat of trade — spreads itself along the shore. The houses and churches in both are dazzlingly white. The soil, wherever it appears, as well as the higher hills behind, is of a reddish brown, scarcely relieved here and there by patches of garden and cornfields — poor starvelings dying of thirst.

The position of the old town — so difficult of access, and so inconvenient for purposes of commerce — was no doubt selected as affording security from the depredations of pirates at a time when the declining powers of Venice and Genoa became unable to protect the seaboard. Thucydides, in the preface to his history (b. i. c. 7), tells us that, while the more ancient towns were built up above, away from the sea, for protection against the rovers who infested the coasts, the more modern towns, which had grown up in times of comparative safety, were placed down below close to the shore — a position more commodious for purposes of trade. His words receive an excel lent commentary at Syra. Now that the fleets of the great Powers have again done the work of the Cretan king, the new town lines the shore.

It is to France, Austria, and England that the Greeks owe the security of their commerce. Without the oppressive interference of these barbarians, piracy would be as rife as ever in the Levant. The intricate navigation, the changing winds, the countless coves and harbours of the Archipelago, offer to piracy such facilities and temptations and such impu nity as no other part of the world can afford. The feeble and corrupt governments of Greece and Turkey would be quite unable to cope with the evil. To these islanders legitimate trade is as distasteful as any corvee to the serf; and piracy the favourite profession, followed without shame whenever it can be followed without fear. In their eyes it is an honourable calling ; whicli, to say truth, it scarcely becomes the children of Norsemen and buccaneers, and the first cousins of filibusters to disparage.

Man in his natural state is not only a political or social animal, but also a beast of prey, and looks upon those with whom he has neither acknowledged kinship nor habitual intercourse as chronic foes and fair game. Till quite recently a Greek islander would no more shrink from committing an act of piracy, than an English or Scottish Borderer, in the fifteenth century, would have hesitated to join in a foray ; a Devonshire seaman, in the sixteenth, to ship himself in an armed vessel bound for the Spanish Main ; or a Highlander, in the seventeenth, to lift a few head of cattle from the pastures of his Sasse nach neighbours. Privateering, also, sanctioned down to the present century by the foremost nations of earth, is only piracy with a licence, which affects the legality, but cannot touch the morality of the practice.

In those early days, as Thucydides says (b. i. c. 5), the profes sion of pirate had as yet no disgrace attached to it, but rather brought a man credit. In proof he quotes the practice and code of certain continental tribes in his own day, and the question which the ancient poets constantly represent as being everywhere alike put to newly-landed strangers, ' Whether they are pirates ?' In illustration of this passage in Thucydides, two from the Odyssey are usually brought forward (b. iii. 73, and b. ix. 254), where the same words are used by Nestor to Telemachus, and by the Cyclops to Ulysses : ' Strangers, who are ye ? whence sail ye the watery ways ? Come ye on business, or rove ye at haphazard like pirates o'er the sea, who wander with their lives in their hands, doing mischief to foreign men V Col. Mure1 goes so far as to say that Thucydides quotes this passage.

He certainly does not quote it ; and it may, I think, be doubted whether he had not rather in his mind some other parts of epic poems now lost, where the question was put more directly. Observe that Homer does 1 Sistory of Greek Literature, vol. ii. p. 52. not represent the strangers as being asked ' Whether they are pirates ?' but ' Whether they are like pirates ?' that is, in having no single object in view, and being bound to no particular place. Col. Mure observes : ' Amid the general blindness of commentators to the facetious element of the poem, this inquiry has usually and very uncritically been assumed to be made in sober earnest.' We must hesitate to receive this interpretation, when we remember that Thucydides was one of these ' blind and uncritical ' commentators. It is, I think, clear from the words of the historian that the question was one of the commonplaces to which all epic poets claimed a right as to their stock-in-trade, and of which no one could claim the invention.

The joke, if joke it were, must have been worn very thread-bare by repetition, as it was the question put ' everywhere by all alike.' I cannot but hold that the received sense is the real one, and that the question is put ' in sober earnest.' In its simplest form, ' Are you pirates or honest men ?' it was probably current in the ante-Homeric epic, when the deeds of pirates furnished a theme for popular admiration and. for poets' praise, like the deeds of Robin Hood and Adam Bell during the ana logous period of moral and literary culture in England. We may infer, from the softening of the question by the author of the Odyssey, and from the expression of blame which he attaches to the pirate's life, not, assuredly, in joke, that in his days tbe innocence of the old time was giving place to a more elaborate system of morality, and the good old rule, the simple plan, was no longer thought compatible with dignity and honour.